CDC Lab Sees Budget Cuts as Deadly Threat : Health: Officials warn that the agency’s ability to do its job as the world’s premier facility for tracking and controlling disease is at stake.

It is known as laboratory BL-4.

Its innocuous-sounding name belies the fact that it is home to the most terrifying microbes known to science, and its high security is tribute to the danger that lurks there.

The lab is secured by 24-hour guard, cameras and motion detectors. The floors above and below are equipped with systems that purify the air and water that leave the lab. Entry is controlled by password and key card. Highly trained scientists wear bio-hazard “spacesuits” and breathe oxygen through umbilical-cord-like coils tethered to their belts. The only way out is through a locked chamber and a disinfectant shower that resembles a carwash.

The facility, isolated on the Atlanta campus of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the only civilian lab of its kind in the United States and one of only a few in the world. It was there, recently, that the first samples from Zaire of the Ebola virus were identified.

But CDC officials say budget cuts and a resultant hiring freeze may hamper the agency’s ability to do its job as the world’s premier facility for tracking and controlling disease.

BL-4 already functions with a reduced staff, one CDC official said. Two members of the three-person CDC team now in Zaire are visiting scientists, not permanent employees. And some of the agency’s other laboratories are deteriorating and in need of replacement.

In recent days, the agency has temporarily staved off congressional attempts to rescind nearly $50 million from its $2.1-billion budget, money earmarked to construct a new lab and establish infectious disease-monitoring systems in several states. The funds are still considered at risk, however, and other cuts are feared as the debate over next year’s budget intensifies.

To be sure, most government agencies are now struggling under funding restraints. And Susan Tanaka, vice president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which wants to see the federal deficit eliminated, argued that every one of these agencies believes that its budget cannot be cut. In the CDC’s case, she said, “diseases grow and wane. Some have gone away and we don’t have to worry about them anymore.”

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But that, the CDC contends, is a dangerous misperception. Public health officials believe that infectious disease is on the rise. The AIDS epidemic, for example, was probably not a fluke but a sign of things to come, they say. “We’ve eradicated smallpox--that’s it,” said Ruth Berkelman, deputy director of the CDC’s national center for infectious diseases. “We won the one on smallpox, but these organisms keep changing.”

Last year, the agency was called upon to investigate outbreaks in more than half the 50 states, in episodes involving more than 40 organisms, she said.

“It’s not the same 40 every year,” Berkelman said. “You really have to be ready and flexible with these diseases. You need money for targeted diseases, such as polio eradication, but you also need to be prepared for the unexpected. Twenty years ago, we had no Lyme disease, no E. coli, no AIDS. Look at what’s come in the last 10 years, even in the last few years.”

In 1993, the CDC drafted a major surveillance plan to combat emerging infectious diseases. The agency estimated it needed between $100 million and $125 million over three to five years to put an effective surveillance network in place.

The proposal included efforts to help state health departments establish or beef up their surveillance and improve their capacity to respond to public health emergencies.

“Washington state picked up the E. coli outbreak because it had good surveillance,” Berkelman said. “But E. coli actually had begun earlier in Nevada with cases that had not been diagnosed correctly. It was a fairly new organism, and physicians in the labs weren’t testing for it.

“It’s important to teach labs in the states how to identify these organisms, and traditionally that has been CDC’s role,” she added. “But we’ve had trouble in recent years keeping up with it.”

Last year, Congress appropriated only 5% of the money, or $6.7 million. And recently Congress sought to rescind $2.8 million. In his fiscal 1996 budget, President Clinton has asked for $8.8 million for the emerging infections plan, but its fate is uncertain.

Don Francis, a 21-year CDC veteran who works for a biotechnology firm, likened the agency’s workers to firefighters on the front lines. “You’re constantly trying to stop hot coals from igniting a larger fire,” he said.

Francis, who investigated the first outbreak of Ebola in 1976, lamented the CDC’s predicament. “If you make it an unappreciated place to work, the experts will leave, and they’re irreplaceable,” he said. “And then your fires are going to burn and burn and burn.”